"In the storm-wind of popular revolt, rising, no prophet could have foretold when, nor gazer at the aftermath just why it was the chosen hour, in that strong clean-sweeping of the psychic atmosphere, millions of unlettered and otherwise ignorant people saw, as with lightning sharpness cutting a black night, the foundation of all their wrong, and heard the slogan “Land and Liberty” to which their ears were so long deaf,—heard it, raised it, acted on it, are acting on it. With that clear and direct perception of the needful thing to do which lettered men, men of complex lives, nearly always lack, being befogged by too many lights, they move straight upon their purpose, hew down the landmarks, burn the records of the title-deeds."

"At last we see a genuine awakening of a people, not to political demands alone, but to economic ones,—fundamentally economic ones. And in the brief period of a few months, some millions of human beings have sprung to a full consciousness of a system of wrong, beginning where all slaveries begin, in the sources of life. They have struck for Land And Liberty. And even if their revolt shall be crushed by the mailed hand of the United States Government (for I do not believe the present nondescript thing calling itself a government, in Mexico, has craft or power to pacify or crush all the seething elements of rebellion), yet it has set a foremost mark upon the record of human demand, from which hereafter there will be no retreat. From now on, when an oppressed people revolt, they will not demand less."

"Portugal is controlled by a government which does not even accept the idea of democracy and individual freedom for the people of metropolitan Portugal. Consequently it is inconceivable that it would voluntarily accept the idea that colonial peoples like ourselves should have these rights, much less independence."

"I have given the subject every attention and am convinced that though the instances (of Mappila outrages) may and do arise out of individual hardships to tenants (Mappila and Hindu), the general character of the dealings of Hindu landlords towards their tenants whether Mappila or Hindu, is mild, equitable and forebearing' ... "it is no sin, but a merit to kill a Hindu Janmi who evicts" ... "Since land is with the Hindus and the money with the Mappilas, to get the land, the Mappilas encouraged (or resorted to) fanaticism" ... "And finally the result was that there was steady movement whereby in all Mappila tracts, the land was passing slowly but surely to the possession of the Mappilas""

"But their most terrible outbreak, mainly due to the Khilafat agitation, took place in August, 1921, and is described in the official report as follows : “During the early months of 1921, excitement spread speedily from mosque to mosque, from village to village. The violent speeches of the Ali Brothers, the early approach of Swaraj as foretold in the non-co-operating press, the July resolutions of the Khilafat Conference — all these combined to fire the train. Throughout July and August innumerable Khilafat meetings were held, in which the resolutions of the Karachi Conference were fervently endorsed. Knives, swords, and spears were secretly manufactured, bands of desperados collected, and preparations were made to proclaim the coming of the kingdom of Islam. On August 20, when the District Magistrate of Calicut, with the help of troops and police, attempted to arrest certain leaders who were in possession of arms at Tirurangadi, a severe encounter took place, which was the signal for immediate rebellion throughout the whole locality. Roads were blocked, telegraph lines cut, and the railway destroyed in a number of places. The District Magistrate returned to Calicut to prevent the spread of trouble northwards, and the machinery of Government was temporarily reduced to a number of isolated offices and police stations which were attacked by the rebels in detail. Such Europeans as did not succeed in escaping — and they were fortunately few — were murdered with bestial savagery. As soon as the administration had been paralysed, the Moplahs declared that Swaraj was established. A certain Ali Musaliar was proclaimed Raja, Khilafat flags were flown, and Ernad and Walluvanad were declared Khilafat kingdoms. The main brunt of Moplah ferocity was borne, not by Government, but the luckless Hindus who constituted the majority of the population . Massacres, forcible conversions, desecration of temples, foul outrages upon women, pillage, arson and destruction — in short, all the accompaniments of brutal and unrestrained barbarism, — were perpetrated freely until such time as troops could be hurried to the task of restoring order throughout a difficult and extensive tract of country. “As the rebellion had spread over a wide area, the troops available in the Malabar District were unable to cope with the situation, and strong reinforcements had to be sent; and by the middle of October these amounted to four battalions, one pack battery, a section of armoured cars, and other necessary ancillary services. As the rebels took to the hills, it was some time before they could be caught in appreciable numbers. By the end of the year 1921 the situation was well in hand, and the back of the rebellion was broken. An idea of the fierceness of some of the fighting may be gained from the night attack at Pandikad, on which occasion a company of Gurkhas was rushed at dawn by a horde of fanatics who inflicted some 60 casualties on the Gurkhas and were only beaten off after losing some 250 killed. Throughout the campaign casualties among the Government troops totalled 43 killed and 126 wounded; while the Moplahs lost over 3,000 in killed alone. A great tragedy marked the end of the rebellion. On Novemebr 19, 1921, a batch of seventy Moplah prisoners was being conveyed by train, but through the neglect of the guards there was no arrangement for ventilation in the closed coach in which they were put, and all of them died by asphyxiation. ”"

"If you read the poem called “Duravastha” composed by the great poet Kumarasan who was a contemporary and who personally witnessed these sad incidents you will get a true picture of the Muslim revolt called “Moplah rebellion”. In the introduction to the poem, Kumarasan states like this: “Moplah rebellion which originated in the southern Malayalam district, in 1097 Chingam, (Malayalam month of Aug-Sept) has written a blood stained chapter in the history of Kerala. That typhoon, which shook not only Kerala but the whole of India in one way or other due to the ferocious and satanic cruelties inflicted (on a section of people) defeating all faculties of contemplation is now luckily almost extinct. It is true that the Hindu society which has escaped and come out of the mouth of this rebellion, tasting the coarseness of its tongue and sharpness of its canine teeth and jaws, and imbibed with poisonous fangs, are representatives of an ancient culture………”"

"“Is it that the evil Muslim s dare assault the weak and forlorn women belonging to the royal status?”.. “Let those who saw remain silent, those who only heard, let them talk” is an old Malayalam humorous saying. Many historians posing as intellectuals are doing exactly this. Their stand is that what was witnessed by Sri. Kumaranasan is not the truth and the Moplah rebellion was really a progressive revolution. Immediately after the Muslim s started onslaughts against Hindus, the Indian National Congress withdrew itself from the Khilafat movement and the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution condemning the atrocities. According to the statistics released by Aryasamaj, tens of thousands of Hindus have been forcibly converted to Islam during the time."

"The first considerable religious riot in India under British rule was the so-called Mopla rebellion of 1921 which occurred in Malabar as an offshoot of the Khilafat Movement. The Moplas burst into unprecedented violence against the British, following upon the Khilafat Committee’s call for the same addressed to the believing population of Malabar. As it turned out, most of the casualties in this jihãd were Hindus rather than the British. Hundreds of Hindu women jumped into wells to save their honour, others being ravished and slaughtered with absolute indifference by blood-thirsty mujãhids. Hundreds of corpses of Hindu women as well as children were recovered from the wells after the end of the riots. The call for this jihãd had been pronounced by the Ali Brothers, Hasrat Mohani, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Mahatma Gandhi himself acknowledged these atrocities as part of Islam’s holy war. He referred to the mujãhids as “God-fearing Moplas” and said: “They were fighting for what they consider as religion and in a manner which they consider as religious.” Needless to say, such manner of fighting for such a cause is the essence of an Islamic jihãd. It should be mentioned that leaders like Azad gave the call for jihãd against the British rather than the Hindus, but it is not known how they intended to confine the war against a single class of infidels."

"There is no doubt regarding the genesis of the rebellion in 1921. It was born out of police repression. Its chief cause was the excessive violence used by the authorities to suppress the Khilafat Movement, and not any Jenmi-Kudiyan conflict, or dispute regarding the mosque. When police atrocities became unbearable, they gave up the vow of non-violence, and decided to meet the violence (by the British police) with violence itself."

"One certain element is a desperate religious fanaticism . . . India broods the horror of the cold-blooded massacres by the Moplahs, still daily showing how Hindus fare in the hands of fanatical Mohammedans. The public, obscurely but rightly, connect the holocaust of Hindu lives and property with Khilafat preachers and realize that the rule even of the arrogant British is better than no rule."

"A statement signed by the Secretary and the Treasurer of the Kerala Provincial Congress Committee, Secretary, Calicut District Congress Committee, Secretary, Ernad Khilafat Committee, and K. V. Gopala Menon refers to the following misdeeds of the Moplahs : “Their wanton and unprovoked attack on the Hindus ; the all but wholesale looting of their houses in Ernad and parts of Valluvanad, Ponnani, and Calicut taluqs ; the forcible conversion of Hindus in a few places in the beginning of the rebellion, and the wholesale conversion of those who stuck to their homes in later stages ; the brutal murder of inoffensive Hindus, men, women, and children, in cold blood, jvithout the slightest reason except that they are affirs or belong to the same race as the policemen, who insulted their Tangals or entered their mosques ; the desecration and burning of Hindu temples ; the outrage on Hindu women and their forcible conversion and marriage by Moplahs‘The signatories add : “These and similar atrocities (were) proved beyond the shadow of a doubt by the statements recorded by us from the actual sufferers who have survived“."

"The communal Mappila outrage of 1921 in Malabar could be easily traced to the forcible mass conversion and related Islamic atrocities of Tipu Sultan during his cruel military regime from 1783 to 1792. It is doubtful whether the Hindus of Kerala had ever suffered so much devastation and atrocities since the reclamation of Kerala by the mythological Lord Parasurama in a previous Era. Many thousands of Hindus were forcibly converted into Muhammadan faith."

"For sheer brutality on woman, I do not remember anything in history to match the Malabar rebellion."

"Sankaran Nair points out that ‘in addition to those mentioned in these articles two other forms of torture were credibly reported as having been resorted to in the case of men, namely, skinning alive, and making them dig their own graves before their slaughter."

"Calicut, Sept. 7 — In my first article I dealt with the prime causes of the present outbreak, the dangerous game played by the leaders of the Khilafat and Non-Co-operation movements in Malabar which set the whole of Ernad and Walluvanad ablaze, and the extent of plunders, murders and forcible conversions committed by the Mopla rebels. In this article I intend to confine myself to the nature of the atrocities committed by them and other details. The experiences I am about to relate will satisfy every Hindu endowed with ordinary common sense that the Moplas resorted to most repugnant fanaticism, which may be ascribed to nothing but selfishness, love of money and love of power, which are the prominent features of the present outbreak. Refugees narrate that, after forcibly removing young and fair Nair and other high caste girls from their parents and husbands, the Mopla rebels stripped them of their clothing and made them march in their presence naked, and finally they committed rape upon them. In certain instances, devoid of human feelings and blinded by animal passion, the Moplas are alleged to have utilised a single woman for the gratification of the carnal pleasures of a dozen or more men. The rebels also seem to have captured beautiful Hindu women, forcibly converted them, pierced holes in their ears in the typical Mopla fashion, dressed them as Mopla women and utilised them as their temporary partners in life. Hindu women were threatened, molested and compelled to run half-naked for shelter to forests abounding in wild animals. Respectable Hindu gentlemen were forcibly converted and the circumcision ceremony performed with the help of certain Musaliars and Thangals. Hindu houses were looted and set fire to, will not all these atrocities remain as a shameful image of the Hindu Muslim ‘unity’, of which we have heard much from the Non-Co-operation Party and Khilafat-wallahs? The ghastly spectacle of a number of Hindu damsels being forced to march naked in the midst of a number of licentious Moplas cannot be forgotten by any self respecting Hindu, nor can it be erased from their minds. On the other hand, I have never heard of the modesty of a Mopla woman being outraged by a Mopla rebel. [Emphasis added]"

"Wilful murders of Hindus and arson were first begun in my own place by Chembrasseri Thangal and his Lieutenant, another Thangal. You might have read accounts written by me in the Malabar journal which was sent to you last time. This contagion began to spread like wild fire and we began to hear of murders daily. Within a fortnight cold-blooded murders of Hindus became very common. From within the borders of Calicut and Ernad taluks refugees come in large numbers with tales of murders and atrocities committed by the rebels. At Puthur Amson in Ernad only 12 miles northeast of Calicut—One day in broad daylight twenty-five persons who refused to embrace Islam were butchered and put into a well. One out of these who narrowly escaped death got out of the well when the rebels left the place and ran to Calicut for life. He is now in the hospital. So the accounts must be true as he himself was one of the victims. During the last week news of numerous murders and forcible conversions came from another quarter also, Mannur near Aniyallur and Kadalundi railway station in Ernad taluk. This place also is only 14 miles away from Calicut. Every train to Calicut was carrying with it daily hundreds of refugees during the last week. If there were ten thousand refugees fed by the Relief Committee last week, it must have fed fifteen thousand this week. According to the statements given by them there must be at least fifty murders and numerous cases of conversions and house-burning. Can you conceive of a more ghastly and inhuman crime than the murders of babies and pregnant women? Two days back I had occasion to read a report given by a refugee in Calicut. A pregnant woman carrying 7 months was cut through the abdomen by a rebel and she was seen lying dead on the way with the dead child projecting out of the womb. How horrible! Another: a baby of six months was snatched away from the breast of his own mother and cut into two pieces. How heart-rending! Are these rebels human beings or monsters? From the same quarters numerous forcible conversions are also reported. One refugee has given statement that he had seen with his own eyes that the heads of a dozen people were being shaved by the rebels and afterwards they were asked to recite some passages from the Quran. This he witnessed from a tree. I wonder what is the authority of some people who contradict the news of murders, and forcible conversions of Hindus. Let them come here and test the veracity of these statements for themselves. Yesterday another report of murders came from a place very near Kottakal. The report says that eleven Hindus (males and females), were murdered by the rebels. A fortnight ago fifteen dead bodies of Hindus were seen under culvert on the road between Perinialmanna and Melatur. Will you not be sick of these stories of murders? All these reports are, as far as possible, proved also to be correct. Words fail to express my feelings of indignation and abhorrence which I experienced when I came to know of an instance of rape, committed by the rebels under Chembrasseri Thangal. A respectable Nayar Lady at Melatur was stripped naked by the rebels in the presence of her husband and brothers, who were made to stand close by with their hands tied behind. When they shut their eyes in abhorrence they were compelled at the point of sword to open their eyes and witness the rape committed by the brute in their presence. I loathe even to write of such a mean action. I thank God that my family and relatives reached safe at Calicut without being dishonoured by these brutes, though we sustained serious loss of property and the loss of four lives (two servants and two relatives— More afterwards). This instance of rape was communicated to me by one of her brothers confidentially. There are several instances of such mean atrocities which are not revealed by people."

"Truth is infinitely of more paramount importance than Hindu–Muslim unity or Swaraj, and therefore, we tell the Maulana Sahib and his co- religionists and India’s revered leader Mahatma Gandhi—if he too is unaware of the events here—that atrocities committed by the Moplahs on the Hindus are unfortunately too true and that there is nothing in the deeds of Moplah rebels which a true non-violent non-co-operator can congratulate them for. What is it for which they deserve congratulation? Their wanton and unprovoked attack on the Hindus, the all but wholesale looting at their houses in Ernad, and parts of Valluvanad, Ponnani, and Calicut Taliques; the forcible conversion of Hindus in a few places in the beginning of the rebellion and the wholesale conversion of those who stick to their homes in its later stages, the brutal murder of inoffensive Hindus, men, women, and children in cold blood, without the slightest reason except that they are ‘Kaffirs’ or belong to the same race as the Policemen, who insulted their Tangals or entered their Mosques, the desecration and burning of Hindu Temples, the outrage on Hindu women and their forcible conversion and marriage by Moplahs; do these and similar atrocities proved beyond the shadow of a doubt by the statements recorded by us from the actual sufferers who have survived, deserve any congratulation? On the other hand should they not call forth the strongest condemnation from all right- minded men and more especially from a representative body of Mohamedans like the Khilafat Conference pledged to non-violence under all provocation? Did the Moplahs, who committed such atrocities, sacrifice their lives in the cause of their religion?"

"Gentlemen, I have just stated it as a necessary condition of the Hindu– Muslim compromise that the third party, the English, should not be allowed to step in between us. Otherwise, all our affairs will fall into disorder. Its best example is before you in the shape of the Mopla incident. You are probably aware that Hindu India has an open and direct complaint against the Moplas, and an indirect complaint against all of us, that the Moplas are plundering and spoiling their innocent Hindu neighbours; but possibly you are not aware that the Moplas justify their action on the ground that, at such a critical juncture, when they are engaged in a war against the English, their neighbours not only do not help them or observe neutrality, but aid and assist the English in every possible way. They can, no doubt, contend that, while they are fighting a defensive war for the sake of their religion and have left their homes, property and belongings, and taken refuge in hills and jungles, it is unfair to characterize as plunder their commandeering of money, provisions and other necessaries for their troops from the English or their supporters. Both are right in their complaints; but so far as my investigation goes, the cause of this mutual recrimination can be traced to the interference of the third party. It happens thus: whenever any English detachment suddenly appears in a locality and kills or captures the Mopla inhabitants of the place, rumour somehow spreads in the neighbourhood that the Hindu inhabitants of the place had invited the English army for their protection, with the result that after the departure of the English troops, the neighbouring Moplas do not hesitate to retaliate, and consider the money and other belongings of the Hindus as lawful spoils of war taken from those who have aided and abetted the enemy. Where no such events have occurred, the Moplas and Hindus even now live peacefully side by side; Moplas do not commit any excesses against the Hindus, while the Hindus do not hesitate in helping the Moplas to the best of their ability."

"Maulana Mohani justifies the looting of Hindus by Moplahs as lawful by way of commandeering in a war between the latter and the Government or as a matter of necessity when the Moplahs were forced to live in jungles. Maulana perhaps does not know that in the majority of cases, the almost wholesale looting of Hindu houses in portions of Ernad, Valluvanad and Ponani Taluques was perpetrated on the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd of August before the military had arrived in the affected area to arrest or fight the rebels even before Martial law had been declared. The Moplahs had not betaken themselves to jungles at the time as Moulana supposes nor had the Hindus as a class done anything to them to deserve their hostility. The out-break commenced on the 20th of August, the police and the District Magistrate withdrew from Tirunangadi to Calicut on the 21st and the policemen throughout the affected area had taken to their heels. There was no adversary to the Moplahs at the time whom the Hindus could possibly have helped or invited, and the attack on them was most wanton and unprovoked."

"Condemning the denial of the atrocities committed by the Moplahs on the Hindus and Christians of Malabar, the following resolution was passed in February 1922 at a conference organised by the Zamorin of Calicut: VI. That the conference views with indignation and sorrow the attempts made in various quarters by interested parties to ignore or minimise the crimes committed by the rebels such as (a) Brutally dishonouring women; (b) Flaying people alive; (c) Wholesale slaughter of men, women and children; (d) Burning alive entire families; (e) Forcibly converting people in thousands and slaying those who refused to get converted; (f) Throwing half dead people into wells and leaving the victims for hours to struggle for escape till finally released from their sufferings by death; (g) Burning a great many and looting practically all Hindu and Christian houses in the disturbed area in which even Moplah women and children took part, and robbing women of even the garments on their bodies, in short reducing the whole non-Muslim population to abject destitution; (h) Cruelly insulting the religious sentiments of the Hindus by desecrating and destroying numerous temples in the disturbed area, killing cows within the temple precincts—putting their entrails on the holy image and hanging the skulls on the walls and roofs."

"It is impossible to believe that Gandhi and his adherents are not aware that this claim of the Mahomedans to be judged only by the law of the Koran, is a claim which is the fons et origo of all Khilafat claims of whatever kind. It is as well to be clear about this, for not only does the acceptance of the claim mean the death knell of the British Empire or Indo-British commonwealth, whatever name we may care to give to the great fraternity of nations to which we belong, but specifically as regards India it means a real denial of Swaraj. For it involves Mahomedan rule and Hindu subjection or Hindu Rule and Mahomedan subjection. Let there be no mistake about this, no camouflage. Whatever the Hindus may mean by the Hindu Muslim entente, and I believe they mean a true equality, and whatever the more enlightened Mussalmans may mean, Mohamad Ali, Shaukat Ali, and those of their persuasion, mean a Mussalman dominion pure and simple, though they are of course clever enough to keep the cat in the bag so long as the time for its emergence is yet unripe. They protest, it need hardly be said, that they are animated by no arriere pensee, no sectarian spirit, only by the most loving goodwill towards the Hindu brethren. But there are some of us who are too experienced to be caught by this mischievous and pernicious chaff and must sound the warning to those less experienced and more gullible. Considering the high character of some of the men who follow Gandhi, I can only believe that this realization came to them so late that it was difficult for them to withdraw. As pointed out in the Karachi trial, these movements at first appear innocuous, then grow dangerous."

"On the 24th April, the day before the hearing of these cases, a meeting was again called at night at which a leading Mahomedan is reported to have used the following words:— ‘They must not be afraid of Government or of the police and that the volunteers would see about the cases brought against them and may God give the volunteers strength to promote their religion.’ The next day April 25th twelve of these cases came on for hearing before Mr. Thakar the resident magistrate. They ended in the conviction of the 6 volunteers and their being fined Rs. 50 each with the alternative of 4 weeks’ simple imprisonment. The fines were not paid. On the result being known the mob that had collected gave vent to their feelings by loud cries of ‘Alla-ho-akbar,’ the war cry used by the mob throughout the riot, assaulted all the police to be found in the town of Malegoan, burned a temple, killed the sub-inspector of police, not the only one killed and threw his body into the fire and looted the houses of all who were opposed to the Khilafat movement, the owners themselves having fled in the meantime. This illustrates the ‘non-violent’ methods followed by the Khilafat committees and volunteers. I give another instance in full for illustration Barabanki (App. XI) which shows perhaps more forcibly the violent fanaticism supporting the movement. More instances can be easily given."

".. This attempt to make searches and arrests under legal warrants in due conformity with the law has been a signal for an outburst of fanaticism throughout Ernad, Walluvanad and Ponnani directed first against European Officials and Non-officials and latterly against Hindu Jenmis and others. Public Offices have been looted everywhere, Manas (Namboodri residence) and Kovilagams pillaged, Hindus murdered or forcibly converted, and the line cut to an extent, regarding which there is no information."

"The storm had burst with a vengeance. Civil administration came to a standstill: the sub-treasuries in the rebellion area were looted and lakhs of rupees carried away: public buildings and records were burnt: Munsiffs, Magistrates, and Police Officers had to seek refuge elsewhere: Police Officials were overwhelmed by rebel hordes and had to surrender their arms: Hindu Village Officials had left their villages: and, eventually, the train traffic stopped for a week between Shoranur and Calicut. Murders, dacoities, forced conversions and outrages on Hindu women became the order of the day. Hindu refugees in thousands poured into Calicut, Palghat, the Cochin State and other places wending their weary way over hills and through jungles for safety from the lust and savagery of the Moplahs."

"With the capture of Ali Musaliar on 31st August ends the first act of the drama. During these ten days, 20th to 31st, Hindu Malabar lay helpless at the feet of the Mopla rebels: it was a tale of woe to every Hindu family: it was destruction of every public building and of every temple: it was murder of Europeans, whenever possible and sufficient Government forces were not available until the 28th to cope with the situation. The one bright light was the Pookotur battle, the effect of which was the salvation of the Ernad Hindus. It had been arranged that on 26th August, Friday, after the Jama prayer, all the Hindus in Manjeri and the neighbouring villages should be brought into the Mosques and converted to the Moslem faith: caps, dresses, and jackets were all ready for distribution among the converts, but the idea of wholesale conversion had to be given up at the time, in consequence of the Pookotur Battle."

"Another Tangal who acquired notoriety was Chembrasseri Imbichi Koya Tangal. He held his court about midway between Tuvoor and Karuvarakundu on the slope of a bare hillock with about 4,000 followers from the neighbouring villages. More than 40 Hindus were taken to the Tangal with their hands tied behind their back, charged with the crime of helping the Military by supplying them with milk, tender cocoanuts etc., and 38 of these Hindus were condemned to death. He superintended the work of murder in person and seated on a rock near a well witnessed his men cutting at the neck of his victims and pushing the bodies into the well. Thirty-eight men were murdered, one of whom a pensioned Head Constable to whom he owed a grudge had his head neatly divided into two halves. The Tangal surrendered at Melattur, was tried by court martial and ordered to be shot. He was shot accordingly on 20th January 1922."

"More than 40 Hindus were taken to the Tangal with their hands tied behind their back, charged with the crime of helping the Military with supplying them milk, tender coconuts etc. and 38 of these Hindus were condemned to death. He superintended the work of murder in person and seated on a rock near a well witnessed his men cutting at the neck of his victims and pushing the bodies into the well. Thirty-eight men were murdered, one of whom a pensioned head constable to whom he owed a grudge had his head neatly divided into two halves.17"

"Of the wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often half-dead bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the faith of our Fathers; of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadside and in the jungles, with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse; of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms, and done to death before our eyes, and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our helpless sisters forcibly carried away in the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and outrage which the vile and brutal imagination of these inhuman hell hounds could conceive of; of the thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a wonton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed; of the images of the deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of cows where flower garlands used to lie, or else smashed to pieces …18"

"Your Ladyship is doubtless aware that though our unhappy district has witnessed many Moplah outbreaks in the course of the last one hundred years, the present rebellion is unexampled in its magnitude as well as unprecedented in its ferocity. But it is possible that your Ladyship is not fully appraised of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels; of the many wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often only half dead bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the faith of our fathers; of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles, with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse; of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and done to death before our eyes and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our hapless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and outrage which the vile and brutal imagination of these inhuman hell-hounds could conceive of; of thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a wanton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed and of the images of the deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of slaughtered cows where flower garlands used to lie, or else smashed to pieces; of the wholesale looting of hard earned wealth of generations reducing many who were formerly rich and prosperous to publicly beg for a piece or two in the streets of Calicut, to buy salt or chilly or betel-leaf—rice being mercifully provided by the various relief agencies. These are not fables."

"The wells full of rotting skeletons, the ruins which once were our dear homes, the heaps of stones which once were our places of worship—these are still here to attest to the truth. The cries of our murdered children in their death agonies are still ringing in our ears and will continue to haunt our memory till death brings us peace. We remember how driven out of our native hamlets we wandered starving and naked in the jungles and forests; we remember how we choked and stifled our babies' cries lest the sound should betray our hiding places to our relentless pursuers. We still vividly realise the moral and spiritual agony that thousand of us passed through when we were forcibly converted into the faith professed by these blood thirsty miscreants; we still have before us the sight of the unendurable and life long misery of those—fortunately few—of our most unhappy sisters who born and brought up in respectable families have been forcibly converted and then married to convict coolies. For five long months not a day has passed without its dread tale of horror to unfold. We have briefly referred without going into their harrowing details to our heartrending tale of dishonour, outrage, rapine, and desolation. But if the past has been one of pain and anguish, the future is full of dread and gloom. We have to return to a ruined and desolated land. Our houses have been burnt or destroyed; may of our breadwinners killed; all our property looted; our cattle slaughtered.... We are now asked to settle down as paupers in the midst of the execrable fiends who robbed, insulted and murdered our loved ones—veritable demons such as hell itself could not let loose. Many of us shrink from the idea of going back to what there is left of our homes; for though the armed bands and rebels have been dispersed the rebellion cannot be said to be entirely quelled. It is like a venomous serpent whose spine has been partly broken, but whose poison fangs are still intact and whose striking power, if diminished, has not been destroyed... Many refugees who went back have paid for their temerity with their lives. We, Your Ladyship's humble and sorrow-stricken memorialists do not seek vengeance..."

"Muslims first settled on India’s southwestern shore a century or so after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. For nearly eight hundred years they traded peacefully. Then, in 1498, the Portuguese arrived, and these Muslims, Mappilas as they were known, became the first to experience what all South Asian Muslims were eventually to suffer: the fate of being caught between the hammer of European pressure and the anvil of Hindu society. The Mappilas responded by developing a tradition of holy war and martyrdom. The tradition is enshrined in an epic work, the Gift to the Holy Warriors in Respect to Some Deeds of the Portuguese; it is celebrated in the body of Mappila literature, nine-tenths of which is devoted to martial songs; it has been manifest in outbreaks of religious violence—there were thirty-two, for instance, between 1836 and 1919, in which 319 Mappilas were killed, and the process reached its climax in the rebellion of 1921-22, in which, according to the Mappilas, up to 10,000 lives were lost."

"Sankaran Nair points out to several other tortures like skinning Hindus alive and making them dig their own graves before their slaughter. The Congress leaders disbelieved the stories from Malabar initially and Gandhi himself spoke of the ‘brave God-fearing Moplahs’ whom he described as patriots who were ‘fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner which they consider as religious’. He went on to add: ‘Hindus must find the causes of Moplah fanaticism. They will find that they are not without blame. They have hitherto not cared for the Moplah. It is no use now becoming angry with the Moplahs or Mussalmans in general.’ Ironically, his allies, the Khilafatists, passed resolutions congratulating the Moplahs for their heroism."

"The first warning was sounded when the question of condemning the Moplas for their atrocities on Hindus came up in the Subjects Committee. The original resolution condemned the Moplas wholesale for the killing of Hindus and burning of Hindu homes and the forcible conversion to Islam. The Hindu members themselves proposed amendments till it was reduced to condemning only certain individuals who had been guilty of the above crimes. But some of the Moslem leaders could not bear this even. Maulana Fakir and other Maulanas, of course, opposed the resolution and there was no wonder. But I was surprised, an out-and-out Nationalist like Maulana Hasrat Mohani opposed the resolution on the ground that the Mopla country no longer remained Dar-ul-Aman but became Dar-ul-Harab and they suspected the Hindus of collusion with the British enemies of the Moplas. Therefore, the Moplas were right in presenting the Quran or sword to the Hindus. And if the Hindus became Mussalmans to save themselves from death, it was a voluntary change of faith and not forcible conversion—Well, even the harmless resolution condemning some of the Moplas was not unanimously passed but had to be accepted by a majority of votes only. There were other indications also, showing that the Mussalmans considered the Congress to be existing on their sufferance and if there was the least attempt to ignore their idiosyncracies the superficial unity would be scrapped asunder."

"Dr. Munje said in another part of his report that, eight hundred years ago, the Hindu king of Malabar (now Kerala) on the advice of his Brahmin ministers, made big favor to the Arab Muslim to settle in his kingdom. Even he appeased the Arab Muslims by converting the Hindus to Islam to an extent to making law for compulsory conversion of a member of each Hindu fisherman family in to Islam. Those, whose nature is to practice idiocy rather than common sense, never can enjoy freedom even if they are in the throne. They turn the hour of action in to a night of merriment. That’s why they are always struck by the ghost at the middle of the day.”.... “The king of Malabar once gave away his throne to idiocy. That idiocy is still ruling Malabar from a Hindu throne. That’s why the Hindus are still being beaten and saying that God is there, turning the faces towards the sky. Throughout India we allowed idiocy to rule and surrender ourselves to it. That kingdom of idiocy – the fatal lack of commonsense – was continuously invaded by the Pathans, sometimes by the Mughols and sometimes by the British. From outside we can only see the torture done by them, but they are only the tools of torture, not really the cause. The real reason of the torture is our lack of common sense and our idiocy, which is responsible for our sufferings. So we have to fight this idiocy that divided the Hindus and imposed slavery on us……..If we only think about the torture we will not find any solution. But if we can get rid of our idiocy, the tyrants will surrender to us.”"

"“I had gone to Malabar immediately after the Malabar Moplah rebellion ended. I saw with my own eyes, 40 lakh Hindus living in abject fear of 10 lakh Muslims."

"In August 1921, exactly a year after the start of Non-Cooperation, time for which Gandhi had promised results, the Moplah Muslim community of Kerala installed its own version of home-rule, viz. Khilafat rule. A Khilafat kingdom was declared under one Ali Musaliar. It took the British several months to suppress this rebellion, and meanwhile pogroms were conducted against the local Hindus, involving murder, rape and forcible conversion to Islam... We may add, at this point, a more recent comment (1993) on the Moplah Rebellion and its political digestion by Gandhi’s Congress, by a Hindu historian. In his book Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism, Shrikant G. Talageri insists that ‘Halfway through, the Khilafat agitation was converted into a jihad against Hindus. (…) If the Khilafat agitation was ghastly and horrifying, the secularist response to it was a hundred times more ghastly and horrifying. (…) The Congress suppressed all reports about the atrocities perpetrated by the Moplahs against the Hindus, and Congress leaders condemned the British authorities for taking measures to quell the rioters.’ Further, he insists that ‘the Mahatma went out of his way to refer to the Moplah murderers as “my brave Moplahs”, and expressed admiration for their religious fervour. After 1947, Moplah rioters were classified as freedom fighters and made eligible for pensions paid by the Government of Independent India. And every year, to this very day, the Khilafat Movement is commemorated by a massive procession in Bombay, in which many Leftists and secularists participate along with Muslims.’"

"The rebels . . . captured beautiful Hindu women, forcibly converted them, pierced holes in their ears in the typical Mopla fashion, dressed them as Mopla women and utilized them as their temporary partners of life. Hindu women were threatened, molested and compelled to run half-naked for shelter to forests abounding in wild animals. Respectable Hindu gentlemen were forcibly converted and the circumcision ceremony performed with the help of certain Musliars and Thangals."

"It would perhaps interest Honourable Members if I were to preface my remarks with a brief reference as to the origin and cause of this rising in Malabar. The fact is that these Moplahs are an ignorant people, many of them poor and nearly all of them fanatical and entirely under the influence—as I learn from the information before me—of a bigoted priesthood. As I think all Honourable Members know they are descendants of Arab traders and soldiers who first came to the Malabar coast some time, I think, about 800 AD, and we are told that they later established themselves by intermarriage and conversion, or perversion, whichever term appeals to different Honourable Members of this Council, of the local residents to Muhammadanism. There have been many outbreaks of these people who now number about a million in the past, indeed during a period of about 20 years—between 1836 and 1853, there were 22 outbreaks, but the biggest one about which I have any information occurred in 1885 after which 20,000 arms including 9,000 guns were collected from the insurgents."

"Stanley Wolpert describes these riots briefly in his book A New History of India, “In Malabar, Muslim Moplahs declared a jihad (holy war) in August 1921, ostensibly in order to establish a new khilafat of their own, killing Europeans and wealthy Hindus wherever they found them and forcibly converting Hindu peasants and laborers to Islam”"

"The blood-curdling atrocities committed by the Moplas in Malabar against the Hindus were indescribable. All over Southern India, a wave of horrified feeling had spread among the Hindus of every shade of opinion, which was intensified when certain Khilafat leaders were so misguided as to pass resolutions of " congratulations to the Moplas on the brave fight they were conducting for the sake of religion". Any person could have said that this was too heavy a price for Hindu-Moslem unity. But Mr. Gandhi was so much obsessed by the necessity of establishing Hindu-Moslem unity that he was prepared to make light of the doings of the Moplas and the Khilafats who were congratulating them. He spoke of the Moplas as the " brave God-fearing Moplas who were fighting for what they consider as religion and in a manner which they consider as religious ". Speaking of the Muslim silence over the Mopla atrocities Mr. Gandhi told the Hindus: " The Hindus must have the courage and the faith to feel that they can protect their religion in spite of such fanatical eruptions. A verbal disapproval by the Mussalmans of Mopla madness is no test of Mussalman friendship. The Mussalmans must naturally feel the shame and humiliation of the Mopla conduct about forcible conversions and looting, and they must work away so silently and effectively that such a thing might become impossible even on the part of the most fanatical among them. My belief is that the Hindus as a body have received the Mopla madness with equanimity and that the cultured Mussalmans are sincerely sorry of the Mopla's perversion of the teaching of the Prophet""

"Beginning with the year 1920 there occurred in that year in Malabar what is known as the Mopla Rebellion. It was the result of the agitation carried out by two Muslim organizations, the Khuddam-i-Kaba (servants of the Mecca Shrine) and the Central Khilafat Committee. Agitators actually preached the doctrine that India under the British Government was Dar-ul-Harab and that the Muslims must fight against it and if they could not, they must carry out the alternative principle of Hijrat. The Moplas were suddenly carried off their feet by this agitation. The outbreak was essentially a rebellion against the British Government The aim was to establish the kingdom of Islam by overthrowing the British Government. Knives, swords and spears were secretly manufactured, bands of desperadoes collected for an attack on British authority.... But what baffled most was the treatment accorded by the Moplas to the Hindus of Malabar. The Hindus were visited by a dire fate at the hands of the Moplas. Massacres, forcible conversions, desecration of temples, foul outrages upon women, such as ripping open pregnant women, pillage, arson and destruction— in short, all the accompaniments of brutal and unrestrained barbarism, were perpetrated freely by the Moplas upon the Hindus until such time as troops could be hurried to the task of restoring order through a difficult and extensive tract of the country. This was not a Hindu-Moslem riot. This was just a Bartholomew. The number of Hindus who were killed, wounded or converted, is not known. But the number must have been enormous."

"They murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatize. Somewhere about a lakh of people were driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes they had on, stripped of everything. Malabar has taught us what Islamic rule still means, and we do not want to see another specimen of the Khilafat Raj in India. How sympathy with the Moplahs-is felt by the Muslims outside Malabar has been proved by the defence raised by them for their fellow believers, and by Mr. Gandhi himself, who stated that they had acted as they believed that religion taught them to act. I fear that this is true ; but there is no place in a civilized land for people who drive away out of the country those who refuse to apostatise from their ancestral faiths."

"It would be well if Mr. Gandhi could be taken into Malabar to see with his own eyes the ghastly horrors which have been created by the preaching of himself and his "loved brothers," Mohammed and Shaukat Ali. … Mr. Gandhi asks the Moderates to compel the Government to suspend hostilities, i.e., to let loose the wolves to destroy what lives are left. The sympathy of the Moderates is not, I make bold to say, with the murderers, the looters, the ravishers, who have put into practice the teachings of paralysing the Government of the N.C.O.'s, who have made "war on the Government" in their own way. How does Mr. Gandhi like the Mopla spirit, as shown by one of the prisoners in the Hospital, who was dying from the results of asphyxiation? He asked the surgeon, if he was going to die, and surgeon answered that he feared he would not recover. "Well, I'm glad I killed fourteen infidels," said the Brave, God-fearing Mopla, whom Mr. Gandhi so much admires, who "are fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner they consider as religious." Men who consider it "religious" to murder, rape, loot, to kill women and little children, cutting down whole families, have to be put under restraint in any civilised society."

"Mr. Gandhi was shocked when some Parsi ladies had their saris torn on, and very properly, yet the God fearing hooligans had been taught that it was sinful to wear foreign cloth, and doubtless felt they were doing a religious act; can he not feel a little sympathy for thousands of women left with only rage, driven from home, for little children born of the dying mothers on roads in refugee camps ? The misery is beyond description. Girl wives, pretty and sweet, with eyes half blind with weeping, distraught with terror, women who have seen their husbands backed to pieces before their eyes, in the way “Moplas consider as religious”, old women tottering, whose faces become written with anguish and who cry at a gentle touch and a kind look waking out of a stupor of misery only to weep, men who have lost all – hopeless, crushed, desperate. I have walked among thousands of them in the refuge camps, and some times heavy eyes would lift as a cloth was laid gently on the bare shoulder and a faint watery smile of surprise would make the face even more piteous than the stupor. Eyes full of appeal, of agonized despair, of hopeless entreaty, of helpless anguish, thousands of them camp after camp, “Shameful inhumanity proceeding in Malabar “says Mr. Gandhi Shameful inhumanity indeed. Wrought by the Moplas, and where are the victims, saved from extermination by British and India swords. For be it remembered the Moplas began the whole home business; the Government intervened to save their victims and these thousands have been saved. Mr. Gandhi would have hostility suspended – so that the Moplas may sweep down on the refugee camps, and finish their work”. Let me finish within beautiful story told to me. Two Pulayas the lowest of the submerged classes, were captured with others and given the choice between Islam and Death. These, the outcast of Hinduism, the untouchables, so loved the Hinduism which had been so unkind a step-mother to them, that they chose to die Hindus rather than to live Muslim. May the God of both, Muslim and Hindus send his messengers to these heroic souls, and give them rebirth into the faith for which they died.”"

"During the past one hundred years not fewer than 51 outbreaks of Moplahz fanaticism have been recorded. The West Coast Spectator3 of July 6, 1922, prints part of a song which is sung by Moplah braves. It describes in detail the loveliness of the houris (virgins) that wait with caparisoned horses to take straight to heaven all those faithful that die in battle, and it is said that every Moplah on the warpath carried with him a copy of this song. ... The nature of these outbreaks has been well summed up in a decision of the three judges that sat on the Special Tribunal, Calicut, to try some of the principal offenders. They say in part, For the last hundred years at least, the Moplah community has been disgraced from time to time by murderous outrages. In the past these have been due to fanaticism. They generally blazed out in the Ernad Taluk (county), where the Moplahs were ... their untutored minds were particularly susceptible to the inflammatory teachings that Paradise was to be gained by killing Kafirs. They would go out on the warpath, killing Hindus, no matter whom ... no grievance seems to have been necessary to start them on their wild careers.... Their intention was, absurd as it may seem, to subvert the British Government, and substitute a Khalifate Government by force of arms. ... In the rebellion of 1921 it was certainly not agrarian troubles that started them on their mad career. The evidence now clearly shows that the Khalifate and Non-Cooperation agitation must be given credit for having inflamed the minds of the Moplahs with a vain hope of swaraj (self-rule) and eternal bliss.... There are no doubt agrarian difficulties in Malabar as there are serious tenancy difficulties, but from personal observation, I would say that the Hindu coolies of the Mohammedan tenants of the Brahmin and Nair landlords are worse off than their employers. ... [T]he Hindu population fell easy prey to their (i.e., the Molpah) rage and the atrocities committed defy description.... The tale of atrocities committed makes sad reading indeed. A memorial submitted by women of Malabar to Her Excellency the Countess of Reading mentions such crimes as wells filled with mutilated bodies, pregnant women cut to pieces, children torn from mother's arms and killed, husbands and fathers tortured, flayed, and burned alive before the eyes of their wives and daughters; women forcibly carried off and outraged; homes destroyed; temples desecrated ... not less than 100 Hindu temples were destroyed or desecrated; cattle slaughtered in temples and their entrails placed around the necks of the idols in place of garlands of flowers; and wholesale looting. No fiendish act seems to have been too vile for them to perpetrate. ... There were, during the rebellion, many cases of forced conversion from Hinduism to Mohammedanism. There was a double difficulty about restoring these people to their old faith. In the first place there is a severe penalty resting on any Mohammedan that perverts ... and in the second place there is really no door save birth into Hinduism.""

"... With Koran in one hand and the sword in the other these lawless bands marched through rich villages forcing conversion or death on the unwilling Hindu population of the locality. The houses of those Hindus and other non-Muslims have been broken into and properties, valued at several lakhs of rupees, have been looted and carried away. Inmates of houses were tortured. Men, women and children were murdered in cold blood. Age and sex mattered not to then. Hindu temples were destroyed; the images were broken; the temple jewels were carried away. The landed aristocracy of the place were subjected to a most cruel treatment. People in large numbers have been forced to leave off their belongings and flee for life to the town of Calicut where they have now taken refuge. The European community also have suffered much at the hands of the rioters, and it is miraculous that some of them have been able to make good their escape across the troubled area into Calicut. Such is the nature of the tragedy enacted in Malabar."

"You are aware of a Muslim group in Kerala called the Moplahs. The only contribution of these people in the Freedom movement was that, during the Khilafat agitation of 1921, they carried out a brutal massacre of Hindus in Malabar. They plundered thousands of Hindu homes and burnt Hindu villages, they raped Hindu women and destroyed Hindu temples. But you know what? Such of those Moplahs as are still alive are honoured by the Governmnt of India as 'freedom fighters' and given monthly pension on that basis!"

""For some years past, the province of Malabar has been disgraced by a succession of outrages of the most heinous character, perpetrated by the Mappilas on Hindus. Bodies of Mappilas have openly attacked Hindus of wealth and respectability, murdered them under most horrible circumstances, burnt their houses or given them up to pillage, and finally wound up their crimes by throwing away their lives in desperate resistance to the police and military. While on former occasions, the fanatic Mappilas spared women and children, they had in the last outrage put to death men, women, children, even the infants sucking at the breasts of their mothers, guests and servants, in short every human being, found in the house of attack." (p. 636)."

"An open statement made by national leaders of Indian National Congress when the Khilafat movement was in full swing also attracts our attention. “Truth is more important than the amity between Hindus and Muslim s in our Swaraj. Hence to Moulavi sahib with his followers and Mahatma Gandhi we speak. The atrocities committed by Muslim s on Hindus are simply true. For a true follower of nonviolence and noncooperation the actions of Moplah insurgents cannot be approved of. What for they are to be congratulated? For looting the Hindu houses? Or converting forcibly Hindus to Islam? For massacring innocent Hindu men, women and children? For raping Hindu women? For desecrating Hindu temples and destroying them? Was it that those who committed these atrocities were sacrificing their lives for their religion?”"